UPDATE: Dalia Dippolito prosecution rests; defense calls lover

UPDATE 3:15 p.m.: Dalia Dippolito broke down in tears Thursday as her former lover took the and said he told Boynton Beach police she was looking to have her husband killed in hopes of getting her some help.

Mohamed Shihadeh, who had a sexual relationship with Dippolito from years before she met and married her now ex-husband Michael, said he thought his old lover was being abused and went to police in hopes that they would call her.

“I didn’t think she had it in her to do it,” Shihadeh said when asked whether he thought Dippolito would actually have her husband killed.

Hearing those words in the courtroom Thursday sent Dippolito, 34, into sobs. She continued crying for several minutes as defense attorney Brian Claypool continued questioning Shihadeh, who said police surreptitiously placed a video camera in his car and tapped his phones.

The surprise move came after less than a full day of testimony in what had become one of the most highly publicized local cases in recent history.

From the start of the case Wednesday, Assistant State Attorney Craig Williams and fellow prosecutor Laura Burkhart Laurie presented a significantly pared-back version of the case the state presented to Dippolito’s first trial in 2011.

They based their case solely on a series of audio and video recordings in which Dippolito is overheard planning her husband’s murder with Mohamed Shihadeh and later undercover Boynton Beach Officer Widy Jean.

Dippolito defense attorneys Brian Claypool and Greg Rosenfeld will call Mohamed Shihadeh as their first witness.

12:50 p.m. UPDATE: Prosecutors could rest their case in the murder solicitation retrial against Dalia Dippolito as early as Thursday afternoon.

Assistant State Attorney Craig Williams made the bombshell announcement after Circuit Judge Glenn Kelley sent jurors out for the lunch break.

Dippolito’s retrial began Wednesday with an immediately apparent stripped-down version of the case against the 34-year-old former Boynton Beach newlywed whose alleged plot to kill her husband was caught on camera.

The quick end to the state’s case means prosecutors will likely not call the alleged victim, Michael Dippolito, to the witness stand. Dippolito’s former lover, Mohamed Shihadeh, was also expected to be a state witness, but according to the prosecutors’ announcement, it appears they may not be calling him to the stand, either.

ORIGINAL POST: In the parking lot of the CVS on Gateway Boulevard and Military trial, a young woman stepped out of her gold Chevy Tahoe and into the passenger seat of a red Chrysler Sebring.

“At first she was moving around, but after a while he was calm and collected and giving me the instructions that I needed,” Jean, an undercover police officer who posed as a hitman, told jurors in Dalia Dippolito’s retrial Thursday.

Dippolito, 34, listened as the jurors watched the recorded video on what will be the first full day of testimony in the case. On Monday, jurors heard audio and video recordings of Dippolito’s interactions with Mohamed Shihadeh, the sometime lover who sparked a Boynton Beach Police investigation when he told detectives Dippolito was shopping for someone to kill her new husband, Michael.

In the recording with Jean Thursday, it was clear that he was trying to keep her talking, an indulgence she obliged.

She told him Michael Dippolito had enough enemies to keep police guessing as to who would want to kill him.

Played seven years later, Jean in the video might’ve given some clues that he wasn’t a real hitman.

At one point, after she told him to check with her on a detail, he responded: “I’m not going to do anything without your approval. You’re the client.”

Towards the end on the conversation, Jean – who was supposed to be a hardened hired gun from Miami – offered up a police “anything further?” before Dippolito left.

“I was trying to give her a way out,” he said. “In return she told me she was 5,000 percent sure that she wanted it done.”